End of Term Report
No one who thinks of themselves as socially progressive would embrace readily the accusation that they are racist, sexist, or homophobic. Despite their multiply divergent histories, what these prejudices appear to have in common is a refusal (individually; institutionally) to grant to groups identified on the basis of one of more shared features (generally construed) membership of the broadest group of human beings; namely, that of (moral; political; economic) persons. As a result, exclusions from that group are often cast in the language of rights; and it offends the progressive’s self-image to think that they are exhibiting unwittingly the sort of bigotries associated with more obviously exclusionary behaviour of the sort they’d actively condemn. Of course, it’s the progressivists’ dilemma that since they are neither conservatives nor radicals they are suspicious both of claims that the account of how things ought to be lies either in the past with tradition or in the future through a theoretically resolvable break with all that tradition represents. Necessarily, then, they find themselves selves trying to negotiate a path between these extremes, ever-alert to the fact that while some radical proposals may indeed promise to advance the cause of social justice yet others might threaten to break decisively with the hard-won freedoms that more traditional ways of thinking about things strive to articulate.
It’s against this albeit platitudinous backdrop that in the series of articles leading up to this one I’ve attempted to address one of the progressives’ latest challenges: the status of transgender people. Insofar as it bears on something consequential, progressives no more want to be judged transphobic than they do sexist, racist or homophobic. They want to stand on the right side of the debate about “trans rights”. But to arrive at that decision requires some assurance that it’s correct, politically, rather than just politically correct. Some insight is required into the sorts of considerations that would support that choice by making evident that it’s the more reasonable option. And since to be on the right side is minimally not to be transphobic we took as our starting point a simple question: what is transphobia? The plan was to make this piece the final contribution to this series and it has two parts. In the first I’ll summarise where the attempt to answer that question has led us and offer some general comments about what critical stance those conclusions support. In the second I’ll make some concrete recommendations that are consistent with that stance and which as a consequence progressives should be emboldened to endorse. In a coda to follow separately I’ll offer some rather more speculative thoughts on why we ended up where we are.
The End of Transphobia?
On the face of it, transphobia appears in two forms: as a visceral fear or hatred against transpeople; and as a prejudice that takes a more abstract or “intellectual” form. Taking that first expression, once we reject the idea that “transperson” is synonymous with transsexual and the constitutive notion of gender dysphoria we hit a demarcation problem. If there’s no specifiable set of features, behaviours or characteristics (“presentations”) that allow us to distinguish trans- from nontrans- people then how can one determine that someone is the target of transphobia as opposed to some other despicable prejudice? Indeed, since transvestitism is no longer associated with being transgendered via the association with transsexualism even public displays of crossdressing aren’t sufficient. Is Eddie Izzard a transwoman because he’s announced that he wants ‘to be “based in girl mode” from now on’[1], and does to be “based in girl mode” mean that one is never seen in public without a dress and make-up? If a fellow stolaphile like Grayson Perry were to follow Izzard’s lead is that who he too would be, even if being based in “girl mode” for him meant wearing jeans and T-shirts (indeed, like many “girls” and woman…) and wearing a dress had been indicative of his being in “boy mode”? Trans “isn’t” as trans does, then, but rather as it says; and avowals of identity are ex cathedrâ in tone. This does not mean that people don’t treat others in loathesome and violent ways. And those people may well account for their behaviour to themselves or to others in terms of hating “transpeople”. But we couldn’t distinguish what such people hate about transpeople from what they hate about people generally whose “difference” they find threatening to their own identities.
We noted in Transphobia and Language 2 that there’s a further complication here insofar as being “transgender” is itselfnow regarded by some as a gender identity. If—as I went on to argue—it makes no sense to say that being a transman or transwoman registers a discordance with one’s natally-assigned gender (because one has no such thing) it’s not surprising that the term has undergone a certain mutation and has begun to lose its relational meaning. However, in the absence of the promissory constraint of that relation (the contrasting term), what exactly does announcing that one’s identity is “transgender” mean? Well, maybe we’ve missed something here. Perhaps the discordance concerns not some instrisic or internal relation but some extrinsic (or external) one. That is to say, the intended effect of avowing “I’m transgender” is dependent on someone or some group that assumes that the avower is a male or female being confronted with that judgement. But that suggests one of two things: it’s either elliptical for “I’m a trans-woman” (or man), or it’s non-specific. Taking the former, if someone’s judgement is going to be contrasted usefully with anything concerning avower’s identitythen it’s presumably on the basis of sex. So, when they avow that they are a trans-woman the discordance is between their self-identification (as a woman) and what they take to be the judgement someone else is making, on the basis not of contingent cultural factors relating to their “presentation” but of the avower’s biological sex. So once again, sex is the contrasting term, and what it is contrasted with is “gender identity”. Alternatively, if announcing that one is “transgender” is in some sense “generic”—not related to the assumption that someone or some group has made a sex-based judgement—it would seem no different from the claim that one is non-binary: that one refuses to have one’s identity “defined” by one’s sex.
I’ll pick up the latter point below (Recommendation 3). Returning to the main line of inquiry, if what it is to have the “identity” of a trans- man or woman has no publicly discernible satisfaction conditions (there are no “presentational” criteria that have to be met) but merely nominates a self-intimating state that no one else has access to, then it would seem that someone might avow “I’m a transwoman” and on that basis alone be a victim of hate. But that can’t be because I simply utter in English the sounds of those words (as if some people were to hate anyone who avows “I am a Grobbingob!”); it must be because of what their use is thought to signify. And this takes us to the second form that transphobia might take. Here we concluded that it should be understood as a denial of a very specific rights-claim: the human right to a gender identity where that is something the content of which is determined by oneself and not imposed by another. Since it was seen that terms hitherto counted amongst those purportedly imposed—principally man and woman via the natally “assigned” categories boy-male and girl-female—had to be part of that suite of potential identities, those terms had to be assimilated to gender terms. Consequently, transphobia in its simplest formulation is the rejection of that revisionary usage. And thus we can see the two forms as one: to be viscerally or “intellectually” transphobic is to discern in someone’s behaviour or appearance an expression of that attempted assimilation.
Without that proposed revision, the hate-behaviour can be accounted for in sadly all-too-familiar ways—sexism, homophobia, intolerance towards difference, social and religious conservatism etc. Focussing on the revision itself, the peculiarity of self-ascriptions of gender identity is that normative authority purports to reside with individuals and not with the broader society/culture. This authority is not assimilable to cases of (i) judgement more generally or of (ii) expressions of preference. When I avow “I’m a man” that’s not akin to judging that the song is a calypso because the latter can be overridden if I’m in error (and I’ll retreat to “well, it sounded a bit like a calypso…”). Similarly, when someone describes their own “state of being male or female” as “man” they are not merely expressing the preference that the word be used with reference to them; rather, that word is preferred precisely because it describes better their gender identity. Perhaps the best analogy is to states like pain, and the proposal was that the explication-elimination schema, introduced in its original form to deal with such seemingly sui generis states, is the best way to make sense of the restructuring of authority that privileging self-ascriptions of gender implies. As we went on to see, however, like their pain correlates gender states are only contentful if the terms employed in their articulation are answerable to rules of usage that do not depend uniquely on the competence of the state-bearer. And those rules of usage insinuate a level of conceptual interdependence that means they cannot be liberated wholly from connections with biological states. To repeat: gender identities cannot be foundational in the sense required. We cannot invest “private” states with content: whatever content they have is due to socially-instigated norms, and the norms for gender talk are parasitic on biosexual distinctions.
I did however end on a conciliatory note. We can make sense of “gender identities” and we can even allow that someone might be accorded first-person authority in respect of the corresponding avowals. But such terms cannot displace sex-terms if they are to be meaningful, and the devolved authority requires that they remain within the ambit of the epistemic, not wander off into in search of some existential promised land[2]. Perhaps the most productive suggestion is that such talk is a “subculture” as the term is understood by sociologists. Those associated with music[3] are often taken as canonical (Goths, Teds, Punks, Mods, Hippies) but these don’t express mere “preferences”: avowing that one was a Punk meant something more than that in 1970s London, as did being a Hippy in 1960s San Francisco. Such identities come with style, attitude, politics; they shape relations with family and friendships and myriad life-choices. They define their own norms in instituting the practices that govern membership and at their most creative are highly factional. Indeed, their tendency to proliferate is a result of being essentially reactive and thus parasitic on the concept of the “normal”.
Some might find this reference to subcultures dismissive, but Bettcher in effect lobbies for a similar conception with their reference to “subaltern communities”. The difference is that on the view presently on offer members of a subculture have no semantic bargaining power when it comes to extending the norms to society as a whole. If male members of a subculture call one other “she” or “bitch” those terms can only function as they do because with group-membership comes what Ryle calls ‘inference tickets’, season tickets ‘which license[s] its possessors to move from asserting factual statements to asserting other factual statements… [and] to provide explanations of given facts and to bring about desired states of affairs by manipulating what is found existing or happening’[4]. But the norm-instituting practices of such a subculture are parasitic on mainstream usages: there’s no point to them if they are not reactive in this way. Now, it might be countered that these local-usages suggest a way of being that sets a new standard; but having rejected the idea that such a proposal could be grounded in a metaphysics of roles or through accessing a supposedly “given” gender identity, that comes down to little more than the view that everyone should dress like Robert Smith circa 1980.
In light of the above I suggest the following changes. These will be regarded as commonsense in some circles, and as blatantly transphobic in others. But those who endorse such suggestions in the name of commonsense offer no further reasons for their commitments and so cannot counter the latter charge. The philosophical inquiry has demonstrated that it carries no weight.
Changes for the Better: Policy and Practice
1. Drop all use of the term “gender” from questionnaires, census forms, etc.
Too much confusion arises from a failure to distinguish “gender” from “sex”, and it clearly serves the ends of some to keep the relationship opaque. But unless gender means the same thing as biological sex—in which case we can just drop talk of gender anyway—then no one is assigned a “gender” at birth. In the UK the recording or registering of birth sex[5]goes back to the Second Henrician Injunctions penned by Cromwell in 1538 (4 years after the break with Rome):
That you, and every parson, vicar, or curate within this diocese, shall for every church keep one book or register, wherein ye shall write the day and year of every wedding, christening, and burying, made within your parish for your time and so every man succeeding you likewise ; and also there insert every person’s name that shall be so wedded, christened, or buried[6].
Civil registration did not become compulsory until after the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1874, and sex was of course one of the particulars recorded[7]. The use of the verb “assign” in relation to sex seems to have emerged within “clinical” circles in the 1950s and 1960s, though the earliest source cited by the O.E.D. is 1969. Although the phrase “assigning sex” is one that many people find troubling, certain usages of the verb are consistent with past and present practices of birth registration. The O.E.D. notes its use to ‘lay down as a thing ascertained’ (I.10), to ‘point out exactly’ (I.11.a) and ‘to confirm by signature’ (IV.16). In this sense, assigning sex is just recording sex.
The problem arises from the coincidence of two factors. The first is that “to assign” also has uses according to which something assigned is transferred over to another (I.2) or set apart for a purpose (I.3) or authoritatively prescribed (I.5). These usages carry with them the suggestion that a norm has being instituted through some contingent social practice (an office of state, a possession, a role), and it is to these that those objecting to the idea that sex is “assigned” object. This brings us to the second factor: when the phrase “assigning sex” began to be used it was regarded as interchangeable with “assigning gender”. The resultant effect of the range of acceptable usages of “assign” combines with this apparent synonymy to obscure once again the neglected distinction between sex and gender, making it appear that the registering or recording of the former is really the (social) construction of the latter. Here’s a typical claim, which takes this conflation to the next step by evoking the pretention to expanding human freedom that we noted in earlier pieces.
More broadly, recognising gender without reference to flawed constructs around sex assigned at birth allows us all greater personal autonomy and is key to eliminating transphobia in medicine and beyond[8].
“Gender identity” is authentic because it records the autonomous subject’s self-determined identity; sex is a “flawed construct” that is used to oppress through objective classification, answerable perhaps to the heterosexist and white supremacist will to power that Bettcher invokes!
The clearest recommendation one can make then is to eliminate any question relating to natal gender but it would clearly be advisable to remove all use of “assign” from such documents and thus reference to natality. Since sex is immutable the simple question is: “what is your sex?” Granting this, since gender identity is no longer related to sex what need is there to inquire into gender at all? As subcultural identifications such identities are far less transparent in their significance than even religious affiliations or musical preferences. When confronted with such forms, then, one should register dissatisfaction with the persistence of gender talk by selecting “prefer not to say” if an option.
2. Do not feel any obligation to state your pronouns.
The relationship between sex and pronouns is of course rather different in some languages to English, and the search for non sex-revealing pronouns long predates the current wave of interest. Indeed, that search was motivated by an entirely laudable attempt to undercut attempts to determine “who”[9] one is on the basis of unsupported assumptions about what are the correct and incorrect ways of “presenting” one’s sex. This critical evaluation of how “presentings” are used to manipulate and control through a supposed essential relation to sex (critical gender studies) is intrinsic to the feminist and anti-sexist discourse of the Twentieth Century. But it has nothing to do with the institutional expectations that derive from the desire to amass imprimaturs for mastheads from self-appointed exemplars like Stonewall. To append a generic “pronoun avowal” to one’s emails etc. is to show tacit approval of a set of beliefs that—as I have shown—are incoherent; namely, that like man and woman, “he” and “she” are matters of self-identification. If you want to show support for anti-sexism and you think that using a non-sexed pronoun is an important move in that direction then state that along with your preference for the singular they at the end of your emails.
3. Nonbinary not Trans, mostly…
If someone says they are a trans- man or woman or even that the simply have a “trans” identity they are presumably trying to tell us something. Since we can make no sense of the claimed right to self-identify where that would take over from sex as the right way of determining whether one is or is not a woman (etc.); and since “trans” registers some sort of discordance (internal or external); my suggestion is that “trans” simply signifies a refusal to have one’s hopes, aspirations, fears and desires fixed by what someone says is necessitated by sex. As such, the avowals are best thought of not as expressing the possession of certain “identity” or “state”, mental or otherwise, since reference to gender invokes the very opposition it seeks to transcend. Rather, it should be seen expressive of an attitude, an opposition to sexism akin to the feminist cri de coeur: “don’t try to determine who I am on the basis of my sex”. Understood in this way, the term “nonbinary” is preferable since it lacks the problematical associations of “transgender” talk, and regarded as an attitude any card-carrying progressive should support it. Of course, if within the “gender identity” affirming sub-culture members find it useful to talk about being “trans” that has no more bearing on the criteria for the correct use of sex terms than have the latest innovations in music or the visual arts.
4. Sexual- not Gender- Dysphoria
Amongst the responses to the British Medical Journal piece quoted above (Recommendation 1), one in particular stands out:
We believe it’s highly important for people with GD such as ourselves, whether we medicalize or not, to retain awareness of our biological sex. Because it’s not truly possible to change sex, accepting our full reality as trans people is important for both our psychological and physical well-being… we believe that the alteration of language and the falsified understanding of biological sex, applied to all people, is the result of extreme activism which is increasing societal hostility towards trans people. We do not wish to participate in that, and we don’t think it’s necessary in order for us to have rights and be integrated into society.
Notwithstanding the continuing adherence to the description “trans”, which I have recommended should be dropped by “progressives” in favour of “nonbinary”, what this draws attention to usefully is the persisting experience of discordance that led to the medicalised model of transsexuality. Modern psychiatry has found it difficult to settle on an appropriate understanding of this discordance. But if it’s a genuine phenomenon (and I have no reason to doubt that it is) that is distinct from the discordance that many men and far more women feel as a result of sex stereotyping in its myriad forms, then it is not a question of “gender” and should be called “sexual dysphoria” or “sexual identity dysphoria”. If this strikes you as an arbitrary stipulation or as an intervention into a field by someone ill-qualified to judge recall that “gender identity” is not a medical term, and as we’ve seen psychiatrists have shown themselves more sensitive to shifts in the zeitgeist than in the wissenschaftsgeist, more anxious not to be seen as reactionary than as amassing a body of objective scientific evidence.
5. FLGB not LGBTQ+
As noted above, if there’s a persisting need for people to think about themselves as having a “gender identity” then these are best thought of as subcultural affiliations like being a Swiftie or a Punk or a Hippy. As such they have nothing essentially to do with biological sex and will not be of interest to many people. While ever the association was made with what I called an expansive conception of human rights, according to which our understanding of the limits of human freedom was being augmented, the idea of a “trans” right might have seemed like a natural extension of the concerns of those who fought for gay rights, and the implicit critique of biological determinism clearly enamoured transactivism to some feminists. But just as other feminists consider the debate about self-identification to be a betrayal of the political aspirations of feminism some people think that it likewise constitutes a betrayal of the struggle for same-sex rights. And once we see the vacuousness of a right to self-identify we can see why. It doesn’t articulate a right that outstrips and transcends the basic struggles for recognition and justice that are founded on a critique of the misclassifications that are made on the basis of sex; rather, it strips the progressive discourses that aim to confront society with those misconceptions with the very concepts that it needs. But what this does reveal is the vital connection between the progressive forces that struggle against sexism and homophobia, the F with the LGB.
6. No Change for the Better?
Political parties[10] should reject the idea that there’s a readymade, socially progressive movement that they can pick-up off the shelf and stick in their manifestos. There is nothing progressive about the proposal to revise the meaning of terms like “women” and “men” in the name of “gender identity”. Consider, for example, the Green Party’s manifesto, which sees nothing inconsistent in the commitments to ‘End violence against women and girls’ and to support ‘self-ID, so that trans and non-binary people could be legally recognised in their chosen gender through self-declaration’. Assuming that not even the authors of the manifesto think that the key to fighting sex-based violence is to allow the girls/women involved to self-identity as boys/men, we identified (in “Transactivism” 1, 2, 3, and 4) what the unstated connection is here; namely, the theoretical view that since “girl/woman” “boy/man” are used presently to circulate genital information in ways that are “rape-excusing and racially oppressive”, the key to ending violence is to make “gender” a matter of self-identification. Notwithstanding the contentious status of that general thesis about heterosexism-racism, the revisionary understanding of “woman” etc. based on identity that’s on offer simply doesn’t make sense[11]. So where, then, does that leave the so-called “progressive” struggle to end sex-based violence, now denied even the possibility of safe single-sex spaces? And if there’s lingering doubt about the commitment to that background theory note that Sian Berry, for example, makes clear that anyone who opposes the Green Party’s official views on “trans rights” is—simply in virtue of that denial—“transphobic”! Since this accusation is levelled against dissenting Party members it registers a degree of intolerance that would strike members of many religious movements as shameful.
On the legislative front, since sex and gender identity are not the same thing; and since—if anything—it is sex and not gender that is assigned/recorded at birth, and it makes no more sense to “reassign” someone’s sex than it does to re-record their birth-weight; no amendment to the Gender Reform Act is required in response to recent social changes. Of course, one might argue that we need to legally certify varieties of pop-idol worship, or religious affiliation, or some other sub-cultural identifications. And one might in that spirit call for the legal recognition of “gender identity”. Since male and female are not amongst those, we only have 72 or so and counting to include in such a framework. And in drawing up such legislation lawyers will do well to recall that the only criterion of correctness would be self-identification... On a more serious note, what are we to make of that existing legislation? As we noted in “Transphobia and the Law” 1 and 2, pressure from the European Court of Human Rights came off the back of two claims: that “dramatic changes” had been “brought about by developments in medicine and science in the field of transsexuality”, and that “confined” to the very small number of cases of transsexual reassignment the change in our legal understanding of sexual difference amounted only to a minor “inconvenience”. As we saw in “Transphobia and Language” 1 and 2, contemporary successors to those experts “in the field of transsexuality” are as hopelessly at sea when it comes to understanding what gender is as the prophets of identity they seek to accommodate. What would the European Court have made of the claim that self-identification is the only criterion of importance? Would that have been viewed as giving rise to only a minor inconvenience? Should the Reform Act be repealed then? Should the Equality Act be amended? Given respect for “human dignity and freedom” the Reform Act should perhaps stand, but the Equality Act’s reference to “gender reassignment” as a protected characteristic should be changed, in keeping with a general elimination of the term “gender” from legal and other documents. What to? In some sense we have our answer going back to the “disjunctive model” and recognising that in accepting that sexual dysphoria is a medical condition we extend the category of “legal” maleness and femaleness to the few people each year who qualify under existing legislation to have their legal status changed. But since “sex” is already a protected characteristic there is no need to add “transgender” to the list, and it can be replaced by “sex” on the list of hate crimes.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/mar/12/eddie-izzard-ive-had-boob-envy-since-my-teens. To my ear at least “girl mode” sounds condescending and patriarchal coming from a middle-aged man and the association of being in “girl mode” with slapping on lipstick and wearing a dress reinforces the rather reactionary understanding of female roles men like Izzard appear to have. This criticism is a restatement of the argument made in Transphobia and Language 1 about the problem using terms like “girl” to identify gender-roles in isolation from sex.
[2] “For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. And then we may indeed imagine naming to be some remarkable mental act, as it were the baptism of an object”. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ¶38.
[3] See Hebdige, D. 1979. Subculture: the meaning of style. Routledge.
[4] Ryle, G. 2009. The Concept of Mind, p. 105. Routledge.
[5] This is not to imply that there was a section called “birth sex”. But the form of entry was typically “Sarah, daughter of…” etc.
[6] Bray, E. Ed. 1994. Documents of the English Reformation, p. 182. James Clarke & Co Ltd: The Lutterworth Press.
[7] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/37-38/88/enacted.
[8] Alpert A B, Ruddick R, Manzano C. 2021. “Rethinking sex-assigned-at-birth questions”. British Medical Journal, 373.https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n1261.
[9] This is not Bettcher’s purely existential “who”; rather, this is the sort of “who” that can not only self-limit but is used by others to restrict one’s life-opportunities.
[10] In the UK context I’m thinking of the Green Party, the SNP, and the Labour Party in particular, since they purport to be “progressive”.
[11] Imagine that the words “tall” and “short” are used to circulate information about a person’s vertical projection and that that information is used in discriminatory ways. What is the more progressive line to take: challenge the idea that vertical projection is good indicator of someone’s intelligence/moral value/social worth etc. or promote the revisionary idea that what “tall” and “short” mean are matters of self-identification?